6 months ago
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What industry will replace business process outsourcing as we know it today? That’ is the labour force and job-creation conundrum that now demands entrepreneurial response and intervention in 2024.
Jamaica needs an answer today because the writing has been on the wall over the last year, and we have not seen the urgency or been privy to plans preparing us for or mitigating the massive technology fallout currently under way.
In January 2023, I shared my concern about the impact of generative AI in this column, noting that there are legitimate questions about the potential impact of radical automation that will result in a mass loss of jobs, high unemployment, widening of the wealth gap, deepening poverty, and acceleration of welfare states, and many other harmful consequences. Unfortunately, over the past 15 months, some of those concerns have already materialised, and the prospects aren’t good.
For context, here are a few of the sombre headlines that have flooded the Internet about the profound impact of AI on technology jobs and the tech industry layoffs since the beginning of the year.
“Tech layoffs just keep coming as sector resets for AI” – Wall Street Journal, February 2024;
“Tech companies axe 34,000 jobs since the start of the year in pivot to AI” – Financial Times, February 2024;
“Laid-off techies face sense of impending doom with job cuts at the highest since dot com crash” – CNBC, March 2024;
“Tech industry leads Q1 job cuts after layoffs by Microsoft, Amazon, Google and others” – Investopedia, April 4 2025;
“AI job cuts: technology will shrink workforces within five years, say company executives” – CNN, April 5 2024;
Almost 270,000 tech jobs were lost in 2023. Over 70,000 jobs have already been lost in 2024 up to April, setting the stage for this year to eclipse 2023 job losses.
The impact is being felt locally and in other territories where the BPO sector dominates technology employment. Last week, the president of Tata Consultancy Services, one of India’s most lucrative and influential IT companies, warned that “AI will obliterate all BPO jobs, and AI assistant bots will take over mundane call-centre jobs very soon”. At home, there have been several media reports of BPO industry leaders lamenting an industry-wide contract squeeze, job tightening, and impending shocks.
Hopefully, entrepreneurs will support potential solutions such as reskilling and upskilling to help our people transition to new roles. We want adaptation and creativity, but there is no escaping the reality that we need new industries; industries that are resilient, sustainable, and that have the potential for huge job creation, with the majority of earnings retained within our borders.
However, these are long-term solutions, and we have bread and butter issues staring us in the face.
It is a devastating and uncertain time for many in the technology sector because tech layoffs are at their highest since the dot-com crash. The dot-com crash is a tech sector crisis that occurred two decades ago after a sharp decline in the value of technology-related stocks and companies during the early 2000s.
The decline was caused by widescale speculation that Internet-based technology companies were heavily overvalued, leading to a dramatic market correction.
At the epicentre of the crash was the United States because of its high concentration of tech companies and significant investments in Silicon Valley, however, the impact later reverberated globally, affecting countries across Europe and Asia, particularly those with significant tech-related investments.
The dot-com recovery was painful, lingering for several years. Indeed, today’s investment landscape has been shaped by remnants of that event.
Though this is not dot-com deja vu, the lessons from that period are relevant: the United States is once again the epicentre of the tech job-loss calamity, and this time, Jamaica has substantial infrastructural investments and reliance on outsourced technology industry jobs, mainly from North America, which makes us far more vulnerable than before.
To make matters worse, there are signs that we are experiencing foreshocks, and the biggest tremor is yet to come. For example:
1. The current fallout comes amid a strong US economy that successfully rebounded from the COVID-19 global pandemic and continues to experience strong, positive projected growth;
2. The most successful tech giants in the world, Amazon and Google, have reportedly suspended US green card application for immigrants, which some see as a litmus test for the direction of tech investments and the displacement of tech talent across the globe; and
3.Wealthy US corporations are in the early stages of AI uptake. Many small businesses and government agencies that account for the largest employment of workers, have not even scratched the surface of AI adoption. Therefore, the future displacement could be 1,000 times the magnitude of what we are seeing now.
Jamaica is in a daunting situation. We rely on an industry that is being disrupted by AI, but we don’t have investments in the technologies. We are facing mass disruption across all sectors, and we lack the infrastructure, knowledge, and resources to compete in this rapidly advancing field.
The situation demands a shift in economic models. We also need changes in our social architecture that will support our people as we transition.
Ultimately, we require a methodical way to engage critical stakeholders in navigating the life cycle of this crisis, and a key pillar of our success will be an abundance of entrepreneurial ingenuity.
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Yaneek Page is the programme lead for Market Entry USA, and a certified trainer in entrepreneurship. Email: yaneek.page@gmail.com
English (US) ·